If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Tenacious Spam In Exchange Server

I received the following question from one of my About.com readers. I am not an Exchange guru per se and thought that maybe some of my AO compatriots might be able to provide the answer.

Basically he is having a problem with an Exchange Server mail delivery queue. There are messages in the queue, allegedly spam messages, which this person can not get rid of. He has tried to delete them but it seems to have no effect. He says there are about 100 messages currently stuck in the queue in this manner and that he has done scans of the client computers to try to determine the source of the offending messages to no avail.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to forcefully delete these messages and / or how to track them to their source to fix the problem for good?

Tony- If messages are stuck in queue and cannot be deleted through ESM that usually lets me know that the queue is somehow corrupted. Without having a lot more information on what else has been done there are a lot of different ways to take this type of issue when troubleshooting. I would first ask if the exchange routing service and the SMTP/IIS has been restarted.

If the messages are actually in the SMTP queue you should be able to go to the mailroot directory and look at the messages themselves as files. You can stop the SMTP/IIS service, delete everything from the mailroot working queue directory, and then restart SMTP. This should clear everything out of the queue. He should however make sure that nothing legitimate is in the queue when he stops SMTP.